‘Today’s Brazilians have no idea what it feels like to lose democracy’: Joyce Moreno on her battles to become a Latin musical great

At 78, Joyce Moreno is one of Brazil’s musical icons, but for decades that status seemed far from assured: this headstrong singer, guitarist and composer was frequently viewed as a threat by her country’s establishment. Aged 19, the reaction to her song Me Disseram – which began “I was told my man didn’t love me” – almost torpedoed her career before it even started. “I’d often heard the expression ‘my man’ sung by Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, so for me it was normal,” she says. “But I was a beach girl from Ipanema, writing and singing in the first person. People were shocked.”

Then, inspired by trailblazing actor Leila Diniz (“her liberal attitudes lost her jobs”), Moreno refused requests that she “dress like a sexy bimbo”, and endured male critics who thought her music “too good to have been written by a woman”. When, in 1980, she discovered that her label had given another female singer the blueprints for songs she had written, she “looked for a lawyer, of course” and successfully sued; in her memoir she claims she was then boycotted by Brazil’s major record companies for a decade.

But come 2026, Moreno has written more than 400 songs, released more than 30 albums, and become one of the defining voices of Música Popular Brasileira – the genre-blending movement that grew out of bossa nova. Her latest album, Joyce & Tutty Moreno, is just out but she already has another one finished. “It’s always been about my love for the music,” she says from her home in Humaitá, a quiet, leafy Rio neighbourhood, where she lives with jazz drummer Tutty Moreno, her partner of nearly 50 years. Behind her, shelves of CDs tower to the ceiling. Elsewhere in the house are six guitars and a library of books; she is currently re-reading Katherine Mansfield’s short stories.

The youngest of three children, Moreno was raised by her single mother, a public servant, in Rio just as bossa nova was being invented in the 1950s. “My brother was 13 when I was born, and mum gave him a guitar as compensation,” she says. “He’d invite friends like [bossa pioneers] Leny Andrade and Roberto Menescal over. I’d watch them closely. By the time my family took notice, I was playing very well on my own. I’d even set my school homework to music to help me memorise it.”

Going mononymously as Joyce, Moreno became one of the first Brazilian women to write and perform unapologetically from a female perspective, and has been compared to Joni Mitchell for her blend of intricate musicianship and deeply personal songwriting. Wider recognition came with her 1980 album Feminina, whose title track is a conversation between a mother and daughter about femininity: “It prepares and sets the table,“ she sings. “Then it lights another fire and lets it burn.”

“In my youth, my mother always told me I should wear heels and makeup,” she says. “Although I learned from her that a woman could be a head of a family, and be respected for her work, she was born in 1912. I was a 1960s beach girl from the golden age of Rio. We had very different ideas of what femininity was. For me, it was something internal. I had a sense of these things, even though I wasn’t yet an avid reader of feminism. I wouldn’t encounter Simone de Beauvoir until the 90s.”

The cultural freedoms and social transformations of the 1960s were abruptly curtailed in Brazil by the 1964 military coup. The dictatorship suppressed dissent, imposed censorship and persecuted artists and intellectuals. While touring Italy in 1975, Moreno recorded Passarinho Urbano, an album of songs by friends – Chico Buarque, Milton Nascimento, Caetano Veloso – whose music had been silenced. “Today’s young Brazilians have no idea what it feels like to lose democracy in a country, to not be able to vote,” she says of a regime that finally collapsed in 1985. “I didn’t vote until I was 40.”

She hails Brazil’s current liberal president Lula as “our only alternative. The far right is pushing into Latin and South America, which is a very dangerous path to follow, and we know very well who is sponsoring all that. We feel the responsibility. It’s kind of scary …” She pauses, and asks if we might stick to music.

In 1977, Moreno – then divorced from musician and composer Nelson Angelo – was performing at upmarket Brazilian club Cachaça where she met drummer Tutty Moreno, who was part of a circle that included saxophonist Michael Brecker and percussionist Naná Vasconcelos. “We fell for each other’s music first,” she says. “I thought: wow, he plays so elegantly, like he’s driving a convertible. We were both young, beautiful hippies. We both wanted change.”

She recorded an album in New York that year with Claus Ogerman, the arranger who worked with Antônio Carlos Jobim and Frank Sinatra, and remembers the disparity between their worlds. “We were counting pennies to get the subway, but Claus would take us to fancy restaurants with dress codes. Tutty would have to wear funny loaner jackets that were always too short in the sleeves.” The album was intended to launch her global career, but was shelved after it failed to find a commercial label. “That was painful,” she says, though it was eventually released in 2022 by UK label Far Out Recordings after her international profile received a major boost in the 1990s, when Gilles Peterson and London’s acid jazz scene embraced her music, and Far Out became her longtime label. “The UK thing was a gamechanger,” she smiles. “Those young DJs gave me the confidence I needed to keep going.”

The new album Joyce & Tutty Moreno features songs of love, healing and renewal, performed with guitarist Adrian Younge. It was meant to also include veteran pianist João Donato, Moreno’s longtime friend and collaborator, who died aged 83 in 2023. The record is dedicated to him. “Recording without João was hard and beautiful at the same time,” says Moreno.

There’s no trick to her career longevity. “Early on, it didn’t matter that I was the only girl on the block. Self-esteem has never been a problem. Somehow I knew I deserved the attention.” She smiles. “Music lives inside me,” she says.

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.